Holding Up the Universe

I am giving myself the pep talk of my life when Dr. Klein returns. She sits down across from me and says, “You’re definitely prosopagnosic. Prosopagnosia is on a continuum. You can be mildly bad or you can be profoundly face-blind. You are profoundly face-blind. In fact, you’re one of the most severe cases I’ve ever seen.”

So it’s official.

I expect to feel worse or maybe even better now that it’s confirmed.

“What happens now? Is there a cure?”

I haven’t come across one in any of my research, but that doesn’t mean Dr. Amber Klein, brain specialist, won’t know of one.

Her smile is upside down and apologetic. “We’re certainly making great strides in our research, but no. There’s no cure. We’re experimenting with ways to teach people how to better manage their face blindness. We’ve been doing some repetitive training with faces. Research subjects will train for an hour a week. There are ten levels of difficulty. A teenage boy, a little younger than you, has been working with us for five months, and his eye movement strategies have become more normal …”

“Is he recognizing faces?”

“No, but we’re hoping increased training will begin to help him in his everyday life.”

She’s starting to lose me, and she can tell this. She turns around to reach for something, and when she turns back, it’s as if she’s a whole new person. The slate’s been wiped clean, so to speak.

The thing she reached for is a model of the human brain. She points to it as she talks. “Toward the back of your brain, over your right ear—just here—there is a specific area that’s responsible for identifying faces—”

“Fusiform gyrus twelve.” I reach up and run my fingers across the scar again, over my right ear.

“We could do an MRI, and this would provide us with more information. Many prosopagnosics also have trouble recognizing cars and places. They often have topographical agnosia, which means they lose their way easily and don’t recognize their houses or places of work. They can have trouble with their hearing. We think prosopagnosia is the key to discovering how the brain processes objects in general. For so long, we’ve thought of the brain as one entity, but we’re learning now about all these separate machines, if you will, that are a part of its makeup, and the fact that these machines don’t interact with each other, that they aren’t even aware of each other.”

“Basically the face-processing area of my brain is either missing, defective, or unplugged? But if I do the MRI, there’s still no cure.”

“Yes.”

There’s nothing more she can do for me and I know that and she knows that.

She says, “I suggest telling people, at least your family. Let them know you have this. It will make things easier on you in the long run.”

I pick up the phone and text Libby.

I’m done.

And I am.

“One more thing, Jack. Most developmental prosopagnosics don’t expect anything from the face in the way that those with acquired prosopagnosia do. Just as a person born without sight has only ever known not seeing, those who are born with this don’t feel that lack in the same way. But for those who have acquired it, it’s not out of the ordinary for them to keep trying to use the face as the key to recognition. That’s the instinct.”

For some reason this is like a kick in the chest. I did this to myself. If I hadn’t climbed onto the roof that day … if I hadn’t tried to show off … if I hadn’t fallen … I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to a brain specialist. I should be heartbroken for six-year-old me lying on the front lawn, my world changed forever. But instead I just want to get out of here.

“Thanks, Dr. Klein. I should get home.”

She shakes my hand, thanks me for my time, apologizes that she couldn’t do more, as if it’s her fault. I want to tell her not to be sorry, that she’s not the one who pushed me off the roof way back when, but instead I say, “Good luck with the research.”

“Jack?”

I turn back. I see a woman there with glasses and sharp cheekbones and hair swept up off her neck. She says, “One person in every fifty is face-blind. It might help for you to remember that. You’re definitely not alone.”

On the drive back to Amos, I ask him questions about the test, and he answers them in this very short yes, no, yes, no kind of way. Then we’re quiet. He is far away, and I know what that feels like, to want to close yourself up. So I don’t force him to talk anymore. We just ride.

We ride for ten miles without saying a word. The silence covers us like a blanket. I’m staring out past the road into the great beyond, but after a while the blanket of silence starts to feel smothering, like it’s cutting off my circulation.

I almost tell him I was this close to getting tested too, but what comes out of my mouth is “I want to be a dancer. Not just a Damsel, but a professional dancer.”

To his credit, he doesn’t go veering off the road. He echoes, “A dancer.” And he’s still far away. But I can hear him tune in a bit.

“When I was little—not just young, but literally little—I took ballet. And I was great at it. I have this picture of me in a black leotard, standing in the most perfect fifth position you’ve ever seen. It was taken the night of our recital, my first ever, and I was glorious. Afterward my teacher told me, ‘You will never be a dancer. I can continue teaching you but it will only be a waste of your parents’ money. Your bones are too big. You don’t have the body for it. The sooner you learn this, the better.’ ”